ce of convicts, and ought to be thankful
for anything we allow them short of hanging." We smile complacently when
we read this outburst, which Mr. Croker calls in question, but which
agrees with his saying in the presence of Miss Seward, "I am willing to
love all mankind _except an American_."

A generation or two later comes along Coleridge, with his circle of
reverential listeners. He says of Johnson that his fame rests
principally upon Boswell, and that "his _bow-wow_ manner must have
had a good deal to do with the effect produced." As to Coleridge
himself, his contemporaries hardly know how to set bounds to their
exaltation of his genius. Dibdin comes pretty near going into rhetorical
hysterics in reporting a conversation of Coleridge's to which he
listened: "The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one
observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than
another fell from his tongue.... As I retired homeward I thought a
SECOND JOHNSON had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men." And
De Quincey speaks of him as "the largest and most spacious intellect,
the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet
existed amongst men." One is sometimes tempted to wish that the
superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old experts.
What are men to do when they get to heaven, after having exhausted their
vocabulary of admiration on earth?

Now let us come down to Carlyle, and see what he says of Coleridge. We
need not take those conversational utterances which called down the
wrath of Mr. Swinburne, and found expression in an epigram which
violates all the proprieties of literary language. Look at the
full-length portrait in the Life of Sterling. Each oracle denies his
predecessor, each magician breaks the wand of the one who went before
him. There were Americans enough ready to swear by Carlyle until he
broke his staff in meddling with our anti-slavery conflict, and buried
it so many fathoms deep that it could never be fished out again. It is
rather singular that Johnson and Carlyle should each of them have
shipwrecked his sagacity and shown a terrible leak in his moral
sensibilities on coming in contact with American rocks and currents,
with which neither had any special occasion to concern himself, and
which both had a great deal better have steered clear of.

But here I stand once more before the home of the long-suffering,
much-laboring, loud-compla